Tim Forbes’s Top10

Tim Forbes is chairman of Forbes Digital and a former independent producer and screenwriter. He writes: “At the Brown Film Society in the early 1970s, we ran about twenty different movies a week, showing everything then available, from the lowliest genre pics to art-house classics to current Hollywood releases. It was a glorious education. And so much fun. But when I think about the scratched, spliced, faded, and otherwise abused 16 mm prints of yore projected with bad sound on poor screens and the easy access we now enjoy to such superior versions of these films, it is about the only time I am happy to be forty years older. Thank you, Criterion! With so many great movies and true favorites to choose from, I decided to highlight a few that are recent additions to the collection or that, for one reason or another, do not populate many other Top 10 lists. Of course, this means forgoing such profound pleasures as 8½, The Battle of Algiers, Contempt, The Earrings of Madame de . . ., Kiss Me Deadly, The Lady Eve, Late Spring, The Rules of the Game, Trouble in Paradise, and Young Mr. Lincoln, among others. Viewers are well advised not to miss any of these . . . or any of the following either.”

L’Atalante

Jean Vigo

Channel Jean Renoir through Luis Buñuel—voilà!—Jean Vigo. This, his only feature, renders the mundane magical, the sad humorous, and the flesh transcendent as it portrays young newlyweds and their life on a river barge. “All day long it’s either smooching or squabbling,” laments a companion. And so it is in this poignant, poetic paean to the beauty and tribulations of married love.

2

Badlands

Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick is the preeminent practicing metaphysician of the cinema. In his brilliant and haunting first feature, he tells the story of a vicious young serial killer and his impassive underage girlfriend, both perfectly rendered by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. The violence unfolds in the context of a vastly uncaring natural world and is relayed to us by the girl through a detached narration utterly innocent of emotion. The result is not a moral inquiry into human action but rather a compelling meditation on the nature of being itself.

3

Belle de jour

Luis Buñuel

As a sixteen-year-old when I first saw it, I was mesmerized, if utterly baffled, by Buñuel’s delightfully told, superbly crafted, and deeply disturbing fable of a young married woman, frigid at home, prostitute by day. Fantasy and reality interplay so freely that it is impossible to know the difference. And it matters not a whit. Love is punishment either way. And Catherine Deneuve’s almost unbearable beauty makes it hurt all the more.

4

Capricious Summer

Jiří Menzel

With gentle humor and an atmosphere infused with magic, Jiří Menzel’s film casts its own spell, evoking the lingering longings of middle age. As if bewitched, an army officer, a priest, a bodybuilder, and his wife are all overcome with amorous desire when two circus performers arrive on the scene. Youthful foolishness and romantic fumblings ensue, but their idylls pass like summer showers, one by one, and the circus act moves on, much like youth itself.

5 (tie)

Senso

Luchino Visconti

In the Realm of the Senses

Nagisa Oshima

Crazy Love—A Double Bill Not for the Faint of Heart: On the face, Senso’s operatic melodrama and the pornographic explicitness of In the Realm of the Senses make for an odd coupling, but both serve up powerfully extreme and provocative portrayals of love run amok. Exquisitely photographed and scored, both are tales of unbridled passion and lust told against backdrops of political and social turmoil. Both end with women gone mad, consumed by obsessive love that destroys their men, who both die at their lovers’ hands. Luchino Visconti and Nagisa Oshima are filmmakers of deeply different sensibilities and concerns, of course, and the meaning and import of their stories are utterly divergent. Senso is an opulent, chilling tragedy of individuals bound in their lives and times. In the Realm of the Senses is transcendental; in death, love is forever.

6

Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

Dušan Makavejev

Possessed of incisive humor and an uncanny knack for startling juxtaposition, Dušan Makavejev uses a veritable crazy quilt of stylistic elements to create an affecting portrait, at once funny and heartbreaking, of a romance gone awry, while at the same time lambasting the conventions and pretenses of society, including, not least, the constraints of narrative cinema itself.

7

Love in the Afternoon

Eric Rohmer

To take off a turtleneck shirt or not, that is the question. On the answer hinges the happiness of a lifetime in this, Eric Rohmer’s most direct and emotionally gripping “moral tale.”

8

A Man Escaped

Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson’s ode to freedom is an astounding tour de force. As a prison-break movie, it is a thriller of high suspense, told by a master who eschews artifice. He relies on precisely observed action, a sophisticated and spare technique (no one makes more of off-camera space and sound), and a direct, first-person narration to achieve a fully realized world of remarkable intensity in which our identification with the protagonist is total. His unshakeable faith and persistent effort elevate us all. His liberation is ours.

9

Journey to Italy

Roberto Rossellini

The voyage is one of the soul in Roberto Rossellini’s unblinking and profound film. An unhappy couple in an unraveling marriage, perfectly captured in the petty bickering of Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, ultimately reunite. It has the feel of a miracle but is no happy ending. Death and spiritual mystery pervade the film, and love seems but a desperate, painful response to mortality.

Georgia Hubley is one of the founding members of the Hoboken, New Jersey, band Yo La Tengo, whose The Sounds of Science, a score to eight Jean Painlevé shorts, is available on Criterion’s DVD set Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé.